<Moving Beyond Rolen>
The Hall has always undervalued having a mix of skills, that’s something that happens across positions. Especially players who don’t fall in the top seven or eight at their position; sure, sometimes they nail it, but not always. Shoot, that’s part of what hurt Duke Snider, who had the record for “lowest first-ballot vote to get inducted by the BBWAA” prior to Scott Rolen’s election this year; like Rolen, he’s even tenth-best at his position by bWAR!
If there’s something stand-out about third base in this regard, a big reason why it’s especially undervalued in Hall voting, my guess is that doing a lot of different things well seems like the default way to build up an overwhelming amount of value at this position, and it leads to them being more likely to slip through the cracks.
For instance, let’s take a look at the players roughly in the tier below Rolen. I went through and looked at the top third basemen by Baseball-Reference WAR, this time using the designations Jay Jaffe uses for JAWS so that each player will only be featured at one position (specifically, at the position where they accumulated the most value in their career).
Using those designations, Rolen is tenth. Edgar Martinez is eleventh (again, Jaffe doesn’t have a DH designation yet, so Edgar and Molitor both count as third basemen), so we’ll ignore him. The twelfth-through-sixteenth spots for third base are: Graig Nettles, Buddy Bell, Home Run Baker, Ken Boyer, and the late Sal Bando. Of those five, only Baker is in Cooperstown, an early Veterans Committee pick (he retired in 1922, and thus got overlooked in the initial Hall shuffle). Nettles, Bell, and Bando have combined for six appearances on any Hall ballot, four of them from longtime Yankee Nettles, and all of them from the BBWAA process. None of them has been reconsidered by the VC since then.
Boyer by himself has reached 21 appearances between the BBWAA and Veterans Committee, but even that feels misleading; he actually was dropped after five ballots because he failed to reach 5% on any of them (the voting rules were a little different back then). The BBWAA actually reinstated him five years later and he immediately started hitting the 15%-25% range, although he has yet to climb much above that since then (even in his VC appearances). It’s also worth noting that Ron Santo (speaking of overlooked third basemen) got this same special treatment following his own one-and-done BBWAA appearance. And while we’re on this subject, when Boyer hit the ballot for the first time in 1975, he was vying to become just the second third baseman elected by the BBWAA, ever. Yes, despite forty years of Hall elections up until that point.
